An
Article from California Lawyer
by
Susan Davis
Reprinted with permission from
California Lawyer magazine. © California Lawyer, San Francisco, CA
The following article from California Lawyer magazine compares CalDisc with other services.
It was a fairly straightforward case. An employee from a copy machine company in Northern California had quit his job and opened his own company nearby. His former employer claimed he had stolen trade secrets and sued him for several thousand dollars and injunctive relief. The employee turned to Minami, Lew & Tamaki for help.
Lauren Harris, an associate at the firm, was assigned to research the case. Her first task was to investigate California case law on trade secrets—what is a trade secret, what would qualify as permissive use of a trade secret, and what would warrant injunctive relief against trade secret constraints?
Harris estimates that the research took about four hours. Had she done the research online through Westlaw or Lexis, it probably would have cost her firm—or her—client close to $1,000. Instead, Harris inserted AccessLaw's CalDisc in her CD-ROM player, researched to her heart's content, and racked up a grand total bill of about fifty cents—the prorated cost of the CD purchase.
Just as law firms big and small across the country are beginning to reel from the astronomical costs of online research services, more and more companies are offering state and federal materials on CDs. AccessLaw is one of the best deals around—the search engine is powerful, the formatting is ingenious, and the price is far lower than most other subscription services. In short, it's fast, it's easy, it's cheap—and it's actually fun to use.
Services That Run With the Wolves
Online legal services became something of a lawyerly rage about ten years ago, and with good reason. To be able to search every federal and state case available by merely fluttering one's fingers across the keyboard seems like a gold mine. But when the bills arrive, the services may seem more like gold diggers. Basic subscription costs range from about $125 to $250 a month; online costs range from $3 to $6 a minute, with extra charges for each search and sometimes even for printing. Research for one big case may cost tens of thousands of dollars; even research for a few moderately sized cases could tack several thousand dollars to a firm's monthly bills.
That's exactly what drove Garrick S. Lew, the managing partner at Minami, Lew & Tamaki in San Francisco, to begin investigating compact discs. The firm has only eight attorneys, but "even with a special deal through the American Bar Association, our Westlaw and Lexis bills amounted to about $40,000 over the course of about 30 months," Lew says. Some of that could be passed on to clients, but not all clients were impressed with the firm's technological prowess. "Bills don't show which database you used or which issue you investigated," Lew says. "So a client sees a bill for $4,000 in online research costs and he's shocked."
The firm invested in several CD sets, including Hyperlaw (federal appeals cases) and InfoSynthesis (U.S. Supreme Court). The jewel in their new CD collection, however, is AccessLaw's CalDisc library. This two-disc set contains second, third, and fourth Series California Cases back to 1934, all 29 California Codes, the Rules of Court, the California Constitution, and a record of 1995 legislation. That's 685 volumes' worth of material, in a one-ounce package smaller than a pancake.
Other companies, including Bancroft Whitney and West Publishing, also offer California materials through subscription. But one of the great things about AccessLaw's CalDisc is its price. Subscription updates alone for the major publishers cost about $135 to $250 a month. AccessLaw's CalDisc library costs $250, and each update costs $94.95 per quarter, a mere $31.65 per month. Even in the first year, you save at least $1,000—not including fees for online searching.
Tune In, Turn On ...
Searching AccessLaw's CalDisc is easy. Harris started her search on trade secrets by typing "trade secrets misappropriation" in the initial query box. In less time than it takes to choose your library in Lexis (or even think of walking over to the bookshelf), her box showed that all three words are used together 87 times in the database. By simply clicking OK, Harris jumped to the most recent applicable case. To look at the next "hit" she simply pressed an on-screen button. Notes Harris, "It's practically idiotproof."
If you don't want to jump from hit to hit, you can view a table of contents, which shows the citations for cases, codes, or legislation in which your search item appears.
Better still, you can view a list of the words around the hits, which lets you quickly glean the context of any use and decide whether or not to open the case. If you find another case citation you'd like to explore, you simply double-click on it and AccessLaw takes you to that case.
During her trade secrets search, for instance, Harris might have looked at Vacco Industries, Inc. v Van Den Berg, which also dealt with a former employee and trade secrets. As she scanned that case, she would have found the following definition: "'A trade secret may consist {Page 5 Cal.App 4th 50} of any formula, pattern, device or compilation of information which is used in one's business, and which gives him an opportunity to obtain an advantage over competitors who do not know or use it.' " [Citing Ungar Electric Tools, Inc. v Sid Ungar Co., Inc. (1961) 192 CA2d 398, 403.] If Harris had wanted to look at the Unger case, she simply would have double-clicked on the citation and jumped there. In fact, Harris could jump all the way to 1934 and back without worrying about the little digital clock on online services.
"It's great because you can take the time to read the cases you're finding, and you don't have to take notes or xerox anything," Harris says. "You can even answer the phone while you're online, or go to lunch, without worrying about costs or losing your place."
The cases all contain the official citation, including pinpoint cites. You can copy entire portions of cases or codes to a word processing file to use in a brief. You can highlight or post notes on portions of cases. You can even keep a trail of the research you've already done.
Most law firms that get CDs don't cancel their online services entirely; they just start using them for very recent cases only. Minami, Lew & Tamaki, for instance, still has Lexis, but its online fees have dropped from about $1,000 a month to about $275 a month. "And since then we've had no disputes over bills," Lew says. But David M. Garlinghouse, a sole practitioner in San Diego specializing in health care provider reimbursement, says he completely dropped his Westlaw subscription once he got AccessLaw. "I was paying $225 a month even if I didn't use it," he says. "Now I just use AccessLaw. If I was using online services the way I use these CDs, I'd have unbelievable bills." AccessLaw updates keep him current, he says, but if he needs yesterday's decisions or last week's findings, he reads the Los Angeles Daily Journal and other hard-copy updates.
CDs offer other advantages as well. In an era in which office space is becoming more expensive, CDs provide permanent storage in a fraction of the space needed for library shelves. (AccessLaw estimates that the 685 volumes its discs replace would be a stack at least 7 feet tall and 15 feet long.)
They are also cheaper than hard volumes: The entire California Code library alone costs about $2,000. As for time, well, the amount of time it takes to get to the law library, find your cases, xerox them, and get back to your office seems nonsensical when you can do it all on a computer, and basically for free.
Available for Windows, DOS, and Macintosh. System requirements: 4 MB of RAM for DOS, 8 MB of RAM for Windows and Macintosh.
AccessLaw, Inc. (800) 477-5396. Susan E. Davis is a journalist based in San Francisco.